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Collaboration mechanisms for contesting harmful algorithms

Characterize how impacted communities and other actors, including advocacy organizations, journalists, legal advocates, researchers, and policymakers, work together to contest harmful algorithmic systems and influence organizational decisions to abandon them.

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Background

The paper adopts a socio-technical perspective, emphasizing that algorithms are embedded in assemblages of social relations. Effective contestation often involves coalitions across impacted communities and various stakeholders who mobilize evidence, visibility, and pressure.

Understanding collaboration pathways is essential to strengthen accountability ecosystems and to identify tactics that can accelerate or enable abandonment when repair is insufficient.

References

Thus, open questions remain when considering the possibility of abandoning harmful algorithms as a mechanism of harm mitigation and accountability: What types of events preceded and precipitated the decision to abandon an algorithm? How did impacted communities and other actors work together to contest harmful algorithms? What technical, political, or social characteristics of real-world algorithmic deployments posed barriers for contestation, accountability, and abandonment? How can future calls for abandonment be bolstered and supported?

— The Fall of an Algorithm: Characterizing the Dynamics Toward Abandonment (2404.13802 - Johnson et al., 21 Apr 2024) in Section 1: Introduction